Skyworks Solutions: 5G will save the world

According to Skyworks Solutions CEO Liam Griffin, the world is going mobile faster than most technology companies expected. And faster, it seems, than the tech can keep up with. This was his message when he spoke to CNBC last week, saying: “what’s happened, by virtue of all this excitement and this data and the commerce that’s being transmitted, we’ve created a very, very crowded network. Spectrum today is really in a digital traffic jam.” By Spectrum, Griffin means the electromagnetic spectrum that companies like Verizon use to transmit mobile signals.

Skyworks’ share price has risen by 41% so far in 2017

SOURCE: Yahoo Finance

Griffin said that no one “anticipated what mobile was going to do for this world, for this economy,” and that 3G and 4G will soon be unable to handle the enormous number of mobile users in the world. Given the permeation of mobile across all strata of society, this would be catastrophic: so much of what we do is online, and so much of the time we spend accessing it is through mobile, that our lives would grind to a halt.

“5G is going to solve this.” Griffin said, “It’s going to be a brand new network. If you look at the five billion mobile subscribers that are walking around this earth today, and two billion without a phone… the five billion 3G and 4G users will upgrade to 5G. New frequencies, new filtering, new technology for us. So all of that is forward-looking.”

For a while, companies thought 4G would be enough for the foreseeable future, but that quickly proved to not be the case. And that forces players like Skyworks to innovate. Griffin explained: “If you look at the top five companies in the S&P 500 today, it’s Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft, all mobile companies. All mobile-centric companies. Mobile growth is really the catalyst behind what we do, and that forces companies like Skyworks to develop more creative engines to make that mobility happen.”

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